Talk:Link farm

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I don't have time to dig into when the PBN section was added to this page. It was completely wrong. A PBN is used to link to non-member sites. A link farm is used to interlink member sites. Some PBNs might be configured as link farms but the majority are not. They represent two different spam linking strategies.

The PBN section should be moved to its own page. However, as I don't have time to do that I have only edited the section to be more factually correct. Michael Martinez (talk) 00:48, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I think the PBN section should be moved to Spam blog. That's a much closer match. I will wait a little longer for comments.Michael Martinez (talk) 20:11, 15 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Technically, still waiting for comments. I've been busy. Michael Martinez (talk) 14:55, 11 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure that PBNs are splogs in the traditional sense. They often have higher quality text though with the rise of AI, that might improve and make them difficult to distinguish from human generated blogs. Jmccormac (talk) 16:54, 11 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for following up. I agree that PBNs are not traditional spam blogs. They can serve many purposes. But in the context of link building, they violate search engine guidelines and therefore are considered sources of spam by the search engines. Of course, it's hard to find reliable sources (per Wikipedia definition) that summarize all the search engine points. That's why I've hesitated to do anything with the PBN section here. Michael Martinez (talk) 17:05, 11 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is one potential RS (an academic paper from 2019) though I haven't had a chance to read it fully.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3321705.3329830

Jmccormac (talk) 17:11, 11 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'll check it out and leave an opinion here later. Thank you. Michael Martinez (talk) 17:18, 11 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for taking so long to get back on this. I think that paper would be a pretty good resource for the PBN section of the article. Michael Martinez (talk) 20:07, 27 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]